The explosion of demand for commodities as a result of the industrial revolution occurring in China and to a lesser extent in India and other developing countries has lead to a search of the globe for all occurrences of economic concentrations of a wide variety of minerals and elements including but not limited to iron oxides, gold, copper, platinum, palladium, nickel, silver, titanium, manganese, and magnesium. Occurrences of such elements and minerals, which can occur naturally or as a result of prior mining or mineral processing operations, can become economically recoverable if low cost mineral processing systems, such as those based upon magnetic properties of minerals, are developed that can concentrate such mineral assemblages or elemental concentrations with respect to the element of interest. The recovery of weakly magnetic or para-magnetic particles from assemblages of non-magnetic, strongly magnetic, and weakly or para-magnetic particles would make many mineral and elemental occurrences around the planet economically feasible but such mineral processing systems, processes or methods have been unavailable, unknown, or prohibitively expensive to build and operate to date with existing systems, methods, and processes in the prior art. Of particular economic interest are mineral concentrations of certain elements like iron and precious metals (gold, platinum, and palladium) that occur naturally in certain rock and mineral formations around the planet and iron and precious metals concentrations existing as a result of the creation of reject tailings deposition basins or lean ore stockpiles resulting from past mining and mineral processing operations. These tailings basins and stockpiles represent a collection of elements in demand in a form that already has considerable energy, manpower and “carbon footprint” invested into the mining and size reduction of the rock involved and therefore such occurrences have even greater economic and environmental attraction in the ongoing commodity shortage and concerns regarding climate change.